[Haskell-cafe] why isn't the thread blocked?

16 Aug 2008

      I writed a little program to test forkIO. in fact, I want to know how to
implement the 'select' system call in haskell:

module Main where

import Control.Concurrent.Chan
import Control.Concurrent
import System.IO

main = do
  chan <- newChan
  handles <- mapM ((flip  openFile) ReadMode) ["/tmp/a","/tmp/b","/tmp/c"]
  let  readF h = do
          myID <- myThreadId
          chan' <- dupChan chan
          char <- hGetChar h
          writeChan chan' $ show myID
          putStrLn [char]
  threads <- mapM (\h -> forkIO $ readF h) handles
  nr <- readChan chan
  mapM killThread $ filter (\x -> show x == nr ) threads
  putStrLn  nr

I first mkfifo /tmp/{a,b,c} , then run 'echo "hello" >/tmp/a', then
'runhaskell thisProgram.hs'

but I got an error: 

test.hs: /tmp/b: hGetChar: end of file

test.hs: /tmp/c: hGetChar: end of file

I think the thread will be blocked when /tmp/b has nothing.
but it get EOF, why ?

-- 

Thanks & Regards

Changying Li